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acquired a number of good (mostly Eu-
ropean) pictures, and worked hard at adapt-
ing to local customs, but he never felt at
home. "1' m grateful for the experience," he
told me, "but the unmitigated joy of board-
ing my last flight out of there, without a re-
turn ticket-I cannot describe it." This was
in 1974, and he was heading back to take
over T eel Rousseau's job at the Met. Rous-
seau was dying of cancer, and Hoving, who
had heard good things about de Monte-
bello in Houston, had apparently decided
that his eye was not so bad after all.
It was de Montebello's good fortune to
have missed the worst of Hoving's time of
troubles at the Met. The 1969 "Harlem
on My Mind" show, whose ham-handed
sociological approach offended
blacks and Jews in approximately
equal measure; the deaccession-
ing scandals, which involved sell-
ing important paintings to help
pay for the purchase of Veláz-
quez's magnificent (and very costly)
'1uan de Pareja"; the controversy
over the Euphronios krater, which the
Times reported (wrongly, as it turned out)
to have been illegally excavated and smug-
gled out ofItaly-these and other embar-
rassments had all been played out while
de Montebello was safely in Houston.
Hoving himself had been irreparably
damaged by them: he had lost the confi-
dence of many of the trustees, although
not of Douglas Dillon, the board's strong-
willed chairman, the man who really held
the museum together in the embittered
last years of Hoving' s regime. As the chief
curator, de Montebello got along well
with Hoving. "Tom was an exhilarating
person to work for," he recalls. "In the
moments when he wanted to be seri-
ous and alert and not onstage, he was
utterly brilliant." Hoving was sick of the
job, though, and openly resentful of sev-
eral trustees. His last big idea was for a
multimillion-dollar communications cen-
ter within the museum, to be financed by
the publisher Walter Annenberg and run
by Hoving, but that fell through in 1977
and he quit. In the years since then he has
edited the magazine Connoisseur, written
five books, and avoided contacts with his
former colleagues at the Met.
D E MONTEBELLO was named acting
director, and for the next few
months he waited anxiously for the trust-
ees to retire the word "acting." In fact, the
board was wrestling with the idea of hir-
ing a paid president, to take over some of
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 24, 1997
the administrative burdens and also, in
the light of the Hoving disasters, to act as
a check on directorial hubris. Shortly.be-
fore de Montebello was officially named
the Metropolitan's eighth director, on
May 25, 1978, Dillon moved up to the
post of chairman of the board, and Wil-
liam B. Macomber, Jr., a fifiy-seven-year-
old United States Foreign Service officer
who had recently returned from four years
as Ambassador to Turkey, became the
museum's first paid president. Macomber
was also listed as chief executive officer-
a designation that made him technically
superior to the director.
"I was enraged about that," de Monte-
bello has said. "I told the board it was a
terrible system, I even wrote it to
them, but I also said I was a good
soldier and I wasn't going to let
Mr. Macomber ruin my direc-
torship. I would make it work"
His way of making it work was to
act as though Macomber didn't
exist. De Montebello never con-
sulted Macomber, and never went to his
office; if a meeting was scheduled there,
he always sent a deputy. He even managed
to avoid mentioning
acomber's name in
public. Since Macomber knew nothing
about art and was not inclined to assert
his authority, this strategy worked fine. It
also made de Montebello something of
a hero to the curatorial staff. Once, when
de Montebello was away on a trip, Ma-
comber decided that the planned instal-
lation in the American Wing of a cast-
iron staircase designed by Louis Sullivan
was going to cost too much, and he issued
an order for it to be replaced with a less
expensive modern stairway. De Monte-
bello sent him a stinging memo on his re-
turn, saying that Macomber's job was not
to do away with the Sullivan staircase but
to find the money needed to install it, and
that he was to reverse his decision imme-
diately. Macomber reversed it.
It helped that de Montebello was an
insider, but for a while the betting was
against him. His manner was often high-
handed and brusque. Younger curators
complained that they never had a conver-
sation with him that was longer than a
sentence. But over several years, as he
settled in and gained more confidence, the
staff found him increasingly approachable.
De Montebello was expected to be a
consolidator, a director in the mold of Ro-
rimer rather than of Hoving, but through
a combination of necessity and personal
initiative he has turned out to be much